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WASM will replace containers

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Re: WASM will replace containers

#181

Post by Dwedit »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #24

When? We’ve been talking about wasm for years. When are we actually getting this future? It’s been 8 years since wasm 1.0, and still we don’t have a stable, easy to use toolchain. Rust has maybe the best support and I still can’t get a basic async application with tokio to work on wasm. To put it into context, Rust was released in 2012. 8 years later it was stable, had a solid toolchain and plenty of people using it…

I tried out WASM for a very small project once. This was built from a freestanding C source file (no libraries at all, not even the standard library). Zig was the C compiler used to build the program.

And I was able to get things working with an understanding of the whole system. You could instantiate the WASM from either a file, or from a byte array, pass in the byte array that held 'system memory' for the WASM program, call the WASM functions from the JavaScript code, and see results of making the function calls. The WASM binary was under 3KB in size.

Now once you want to use libraries, everything light and small about WASM goes out the window. You're at the mercy of how efficiently the library code was implemented, and how many dependencies they used while doing so.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#182

Post by sleepybrett »

stackskipton wrote: post #83

As PlatformOps (formerly DevOps (formerly SRE (formerly Ops))), either this was hilarious satire or ChatGPT Ketamine trip. I'm not sure. > In the year 2030, no one will remember Kubernetes. So what's going to handle out rolling out new versions of your WASM, setting up whatever Reverse Proxy you pick and other stuff involved getting. A bunch of scripts you wrote to do this for you? https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/202…

The impression I got initially was WASM is a way to ship and app into the browser as a blob of bytecode. No more random pile of js files that are largely unreadable due to trying to shave every last extra byte off them.

While I would lament the age that I came up in, where if some hot company down the street had just a killer javascript dropdown menu well you could just view source and maybe learn a few things. I think what that initial impression I got was a great idea.

But yeah, the concept has kind of expanded. I want to say you can write WASM 'plugins' for istio. Which I also think is pretty cool.

Something is going to replace containers, I say let them take a swing at it but I think at the end of the day you get something that ends up looking a lot like containers.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#184

Post by SEJeff »

josephg wrote: post #95
not2b wrote: post #13

"The main thing holding back wider adoption is a lack of system interfaces. File access, networking, etc. But it's just a matter of time before these features get integrated." But then you've got to figure out and prevent all the security holes that can be introduced by adding file access, networking, etc. That's what killed the Java write-once, run-anywhere promise. Maybe put the whole thing into a container? Oops,…

True, but I suspect it'll be a lot easier to virtualise all those APIs through WASM than it is for a regular native binary. I mean, half the point of docker is that all syscalls are routed into an LXD container with its own filesystem and network. It should be pretty easy to do the same thing in userland with a wasm runtime. And the nice thing about that is you can pick which environment a wasm bundle runs in. Want t…

docker and lxd are competing projects. Docker does not use lxd to launch containers. lxd was written by the lead dev (at canonical) of lxc which was not as polished as docker but sort of kind of did the same thing (ran better chroots)

They both use Linux kernel features such as control groups and namespaces. When put together this is referred to as a container but the kernel has zero concept of “a container”.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#185

Post by aitchnyu »

c0balt wrote: post #163

> In the year 2030, no one will remember Kubernetes. As a sys admin, no, we will have to remember. Once a system is in place and "functions", they tend to stay for a long time.

I believe at least one consulting company in this Indian city is still training new graduates in COBOL and setting them up with dead end careers.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#186

Post by SEJeff »

For folks interested in the current state of the art on sandboxing, here is a stab one of my former coworkers did:

https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/blob/main/src/ut...

He researched chromeos process virtualization, moby (docker upstream), and chrome tab isolation. It’s all done ebpf magic on top of seccomp at its core.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#188

Post by timeflex »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #179
ninetyninenine wrote: post #25

You underestimate developers. WASM will never replace containers. People will be running wasm inside of containers. That's what will happen.

WASM can, but does not replace containers. What is different is that instead of 20 applications running in 20 containers, 1000 applications will comfortably fit in one container, with better sandboxing than the linux process model at the application level.

I really wish you knew how silly this sounds & is. Why would you even run 1 container for 1000 applications if you're saying that WASM provides better sandboxing? Why wouldn't you just run a single WASM process? Also, containers are generally meant for single processes to provide isolation for each app, not to have all your apps running together with the same access.

What many people don't get between WASM & containers is that containers don't need software developers to make changes to support containers. WASM however relies on software developers to make changes to their apps. Otherwise, you have to emulate an entire architecture in WASM which doesn't perform well. It is the difference between VMs, which emulates physical hardware & containers which doesn't need to emulate the hardware cause it provides the sandboxing using kernel features.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#190

Post by timeflex »

aftbit wrote: post #29
ninetyninenine wrote: post #25

You underestimate developers. WASM will never replace containers. People will be running wasm inside of containers. That's what will happen.

Containers will never replace VMs either. People will be running WASM inside of containers inside of VMs.

Absolutely they will & do. The kernel provides the necessary sandboxing & is faster, even with things like Firecracker.
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